The first wardroom tables were part of sailing ships in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Wardrooms served as the place where the ship's officers gathered for meals and meetings, where they received guests and entertained. When the ship prepared for battle, the crew would sprinkle sand on the floor of the wardroom to provide better footing when wet with blood, and the wardroom table would serve as an operating table in the temporary surgery. Thus, from the earliest applications, the wardroom and its table has been a multipurpose facility.
However, the changes in use of the wardroom and its furnishings in the old sailing ships did not involve changes in the configuration of the table itself, and never were there any ergonomic or anthropometric considerations beyond the most normative rules of thumb. The typical wardroom table was a simple rectangular surface with curbs of a few inches in height to prevent plates, cups and silverware from sliding off in rolling seas. In the 19th century, a few tables were built into gimballed frames which allowed them to remain relatively level while the ship rolled and pitched.
However, this gimballing arrangement did not enhance the anthropometric or ergonomic accommodations and in fact militated against these considerations for the individual crew members as the table would apppear to swing relative to the ship's movements, in order that the food and beverages remain on a fairly level surface and not spill.
Wardroom tables have been part of the manned systems support of two prior space stations, the US Skylab, which flew in 1973, and the Soviet Mir, which was launched in 1986. Both these tables designs are static, fixed and passive and attempt to meet anthropometric neutral body posture requirements principally by embodying dimensional comprises to suit the range of crew member sizes and crew activities that were anticipated to fly on each of these spacecraft.
The Skylab table consisted of three rectangular tops oriented at 120 degrees apart to accommodate the three crew members that would occupy the Skylab at one time [Skylab Experience Bulletin No. 18 entitled "Evaluation of Skylab 1VA Architecture", December 1975, Johnson Space Center Report No. 09552, page 11, FIG. 7]. Recessed into the surfaces of these tops were receptacles to hold food containers and restrain them from floating away.
On Mir, the table is a long, flat rectangle, attached at one end to an interior bulkhead. The table surface is made up of several storage compartment lids which hold various tools and implements. There is a row of receptacle openings along each of the long edges of the Mir table to restrain food containers, but they appear to be intended more for short-term stowage than for convenient eating [Aviation Week & Space Technology, July 20, 1987 Issue, pages 58-60]. This arrangement suggests that the primary purpose of the Mir table is to serve as a work bench, at which eating may be considered as a secondary function.
On commercial airliners, each passenger seat is outfitted with a tray table that generally either deploys out from a recess in the back of the seat in front of the passenger or deploys, pivots and unfolds from the armrest of the passenger's seat. These airline tray tables are designed to provide limited working, eating and drinking accomodations to individual passengers on realtively short duration trips which rarely last in excess of 15 or 20 hours on the same aircraft.
In addition to the above prior art, there is a substantial body of prior art dealing generally with the construction of tables. For example, the following issued U.S. patents disclose various forms of tables having changeable configurations or other special features and to related apparatus: U.S. Pat. No. 1,618,523, issued Feb. 22, 1927 to Feldman et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 1,735,535, issued Nov. 12, 1929 to Feldman; U.S. Pat. No. 1,781,602, issued Nov. 11, 1930; 2,014,745, issued Sept. 17, 1935 to Regli; U.S. Pat. No. 2,322,039, issued June 15, 1943 to Greitzer; U..S. Pat. No. 2,394,866, issued Feb. 12, 1946 to McClune; U.S. Pat. 2,517,018, issued Aug. 1, 1950 to Nicholson; U.S. Pat. No. 3,123,935, issued Mar. 10, 1964 to Williams; U.S. Pat. No. 3,198,145, issued Aug. 3, 1965 to Duncan; U.S. Pat. No. 3,361,508, issued Jan. 2, 1968, to Chassevent; U.S. Pat. No. 3,512,740, issued May 19, 1970 to Podwalny; U.S. Pat. No. 3,875,872, issued Apr. 8, 1975 to Kayner; U.S. Pat. No. 3,877,668, issued Apr. 15, 1975 to Von Sande; U.S. Pat. 4,050,549, issued Aug. 9, 1977 to Sadler; U.S. Pat. No. 4,387,650, issued June 14, 1983 to Pizzi; U.S. Pat. No. 4,579,311, issued Apr. 1, 1986 to Spranza. However, none of these patents disclose a table which will meet the needs of the multipurpose table for a wardroom in a space station or similar confined environment.
The principal disadvantages of the prior art stem from the circumstance that they appear to have been designed from the perspective of serving a very limited range of anthropmetric sizes and ergonomically narrow notions of activities. The Skylab table was designed and built before NASA had any solid information on neutral body posture, in fact virtually all of our microgravity and neutral body posture data come from the Skylab program [Skylab Experience Bulletin No. 17 entitled "Neutral Body Posture in Zero-G, July 1975, Johnson Space Center Report No. 09551, page 21]. The Mir table appears to be equally oblivious to neutral body posture data, but this is probably because it is intended as such a generally purpose work-bench that a flat, fixed surface is the lowest common denominator practical design solution.
Neither the Skylab nor the Mir tables, nor any of the tables disclosed in the above mentioned United States patents, provide dynamic accommodations for variations in crew size, activities or viewing orientations. Neither table adjusts to accommodate differences in anthropometric size or ergonomic differences due to the characteristics of different activities such as eating, writing, working on a computer or conducting a meeting or videoconference. Neither table is designed to fold or stow out of the way easily to allow passage of large objects.
In case of the airline passenger tray table, the design is intended for short term service to one passenger. The airline tray table is not intended to enhance social or group communication with the other passengers and in fact may make it more difficult. These tray tables also make passenger movement extremely difficult and after being served a passenger generally must remain captive in his seat until a flight attendant clears away the debris of his meal. Because these tray tables are extremely confining, uncomfortable and inconvenient for the passengers to use, and do not accommodate and anthropometric adjustments to different sizes of people or ergonomic adjustments for different types of tasks or activities, they are not suitable for a long duration space mission in a microgravity environment.